When you submit a job to be run in a
Compute Cluster Server, you will find some information about the running tasks at the bottom pane. Information such as error output, task name, and so on is shown, but there is one vital piece of information that should be shown (IMHO) by default and it is not: what nodes are running the current task?
Luckily, this can easily be solved by right clicking on the column headers, selecting
Add/Remove Columns and adding the Allocated Nodes column. This will make it easier to know where to look for output. The following clip shows how it is done (BTW, if you have not checked
Jing, make sure you do, it's amazing):
Oops...nevermind, apparently our Community Server blog cannot embed objects correctly :(
Check out the video in this link:
Finding Nodes of your Job
The other day I had a meeting with a client that is considering converting his Informix 4GL application to Java, using our tools. It was an interesting situation, since he was a in business development, and not really a programmer. He then asked me if I could recommend him some books on Java from a business perspective. I agreed – without knowing how difficult that task could be.
I couldn’t find any recent books that would give an overview of the platform for non-technical personnel, especially decision-making managers. I found a couple of books from the start of the Java era, 1996/1997, that talked about what I was looking for, but they are out of print and it doesn’t look like they were ever updated. They are:
Does anybody know a good Java book that meet the criteria that I’m looking for?
Leave a comment with your recommendations!
Today while tryng to do a V2V migration form Parallels to VMWare, I had the need to boot my current VM into BartPE so I could create an image with Tru Image. When the VM started up, I tried to press al sorts of F key combos to get to the BIOS screen. In Virtual Server/Virtual PC, pressing F2 does the trick; but in Parallels it was not working.
After taking a trip to the VM preferences, I found that this is set within the VM properties, and is actually quite simple:
To recap, on my
last post we went through some of the steps that need to be taken when debugging an MPI application, namely:
-Install the x64 remote debugger
-Copy mpishim to an accessible loction
-Modify the registry to avoid UNC path problems in the future
Let's go ahead and finish the rest of the steps in order to debug an MPI application.
Step 4: Configure an Empty Job with the Job SchedulerThe job scheduler is a utility by which all jobs that are submitted to the cluster are managed. If you want to have something done at the cluster for you, then you need to use the job scheduler. Debugging is no exception, as you need to create an empty job that will host your debugging application.
To get started, open the job scheduler and from the File menu, select Submit Job:
Name your job "Debugging Job" and move over to the Processors tab. Select the number of processors you would like to use for this job and then (this is actually quite important), check the box that says "Run Job until end of run time or until cancelled". Failure to check this box will cause the empty job to run and finish - which is not what we want. We want the job to continually run, so that Visual Studio will then attach the running processes to this specific job. Don't forget to mark this!:
Next, you need to move to the Advanced tab and select which nodes will be part of your debugging scheme. In this case, I will only use 2 nodes, namely Kim03a (the head node) and Kim02a:
Click on submit job, you should see your job running. Make sure you write down the
ID of the job (in this case, it is 3) as you will need this info later on!!
Step 5: Configure Visual StudioOpen Visual studio and the project you are working on. Go to project properties and access the Debugging section. From there, instead of the Local Debugger, select MPI Cluster Debugger:
The following screenshot shows my debugger properties window with all necessary values filled in:
Let's go ahead and talk about each of these values:
MPI Run Command: This needs to be mpiexec for MPI applications
MPIRun Arguments: The first argument "-job 3.0" is to specify which is the job in the scheduler to use. In my case, it was 3 when I created the job, and the 0 is to specify the task, which every job has by default. We then have "-np 2" which is used to specify that we will be using 2 nodes for this job. Finally you see I have "-machinefile \\kim03a\bin\machines.txt". The "-machinefile" is used to specfify the UNV location of a text file that contains the names of the machines that will be part of this job. The text file should have the names of the machines on each line.
MPIRun Working Directory: Use this location to specify the path where any output will be written to. Remember NOT to use absolute paths but rather UNC paths to make sure that this location is available to every node.
Application Command: This is the UNV path to the MPI application that you would like to debug. This application HAS to be compiled to 64-bit and debugging symbols should be in that same directory as well.
MPIShim Location: In this location, specify the path to the mpishim.exe binary that you copied in step 2 of this tutorial. Remember, mpishim should exist on each and every one of the machines at the specified local path.
MPI network security mode: I usually change it to Accept connections from any address to avoid problems
You probably also noted that there is an
Application Arguments window. In this row you would specify any additional commands you would like to send to the application.
Apply the settings, hit F5 and you should be ready to go and debug your processes. While trying to get this to work, I experienced pretty much every error out there, so post in the comments if you any issues and I will help you resolve them. Happy debugging!
The Compute Cluster Pack can be downloaded from Microsoft's site; however it is not as trivial as it sounds. These steps will hopefully make it easier to obatin the bits:
- Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/ccs/default.aspx
- Click on the Get the Trial Software link:
- Click on the big blue button that says Get Started Today
- Sign-in to microsoft
- Select your country from the list
- Fill out the information that is being requested
- Review your order total (whooping $0.00), agree to the terms and conditions and click Place Order
- You will get a receipt and can now click on link to go to the installation instructions
- You will then be presented with the option to download the Compute Cluster Pack:
Enjoy!
While assisting some customers at a High Performance Computing Event, I had the need to remember how to debug an MPI application. See, when you create distributed applications that will run on various computers (nodes) you need to use special tools to debug them. Think about it, you want have a centralized Visual Studio instance and be able to debug each process within the same IDE. Even though the idea sounds demented, the implementation is actually quite simple given that you follow the steps carefully. Let's get started.
This is lengthy tutorial, so it will most likely be split into various steps.
Edit: It is now a 2 part tutorial, Part 2 is
found here.
Step 1 : Install the Remote DebuggerYou need to install the Remote Debugguer on EACH of the nodes that will run the application you are trying to debug. The remote debugger is included on the Visual Studio 2005 distribution media within the “\vs\Remote Debugger\x64” folder.
You need to install it on each of the compute nodes (and on the head node if it is going to be working as a compute node). Once you install it, make sure you fire it up so that it will be awaiting connections.
You need to use the x64 remote debugguer. Distributed applications on Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster edition
NEED to be 64-bit if you would like to debug them with mpishim.
Step 2: Make mpishim Easily AccesibleWhen you install the remote debugger, mpishim is installed. Mpishim is the binary responsible for launching the processes on each of the nodes for debugging. The default location for mpishim is "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\Remote Debugguer\x64". The trick here is to copy all those binaries from that x64 folder to a place that is easier to specify (such as c:\windows\system32). By doing so, you do not need to specify the whole path of mpishim when modifying the project properties debug info (which will be done later on).
Furthermore, you want to make sure that you copy mpishim to the
same location on
EACH compute node. That is, if you coiped mpishim on c:\windows\system32 on Node 1, then you must copy it for the rest of the nodes as well in the exact same directory.
It is a good idea to copy all of the files within that directory in order to avoid missing on a dependency that mpishim may have.
Step 3: Modify the RegistryCmd.exe has an issue with UNC paths. MPI Debugging relies on these paths so just to be safe and make sure nothing breaks, carry out the following modification on each of the clusters. Access the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor
Add a DWORD entry entitled
“DisableUNCCheck” and set the value to 1:
That about covers the first half, on my next post I will cover the what needs to be done at the scheduler and visual studio level. Read the
second part in this link.
One of
ArtinSoft’s most recent customers performed a thorough analysis around upgrading all their critical Visual Basic 6.0 and ASP applications, accounting for about 5 millions of lines of code, to C# and ASP.NET 2.0.
End of Life for Visual Basic 6.0 and the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) played a big role on their decision. The end of extended support for VB 6.0 in March 31, 2008 means that there will not be access to new technologies that allow to take full advantage of the company’s hardware investment, and that the business will find it hard to react to market changes. Plus their own corporate IT management policies state that all business areas should only use software and operative systems supported by an approved provider and have an appropriate patch/upgrade configuration mechanism.
A migration aligns with the corporate strategies in many ways. Business wise, they highly value any investment in initiatives that contribute to improve customer royalty, increase employee productivity and reduce costs, and it was estimated that improving system performance will increase user productivity between 0.04 – 0.05%. And regarding their systems, they look forward to minimizing the learning curve and required trainings, procuring an extensible and easy-maintainable code base, and maintain knowledge through the preservation of business rules, comments and cross references.
But why chose
ArtinSoft’s VB to .NET automated conversion solutions and Microsoft’s .NET as the target platform? Well, they listed several reasons.
I’m not going to evangelize on the benefits of .NET, but I would like to mention a couple of our customer’s motivations. The .NET platform is the base of a complete strategy that integrates all Microsoft’s products, from the OS to market applications. It is a response to a growing market of web-based business processes. On the long run, it seems that Microsoft intention is to replace API Win32 or Windows API with the .NET platform. This could be because their lack of detailed documentation, uniformity and cohesion between its components, causing issues when developing Windows-based applications. .NET addresses most of these issues by providing a single, easily extensible group of interconnected blocks that eases the development of robust applications. In general, the .NET framework has a lot of advantages for increasing productivity.
On the other hand, they chose
ArtinSoft’s solution basically because it proved to have a much lower risk and overall cost than other alternatives. They’ve been developing most of their applications since 1990, and an automated migration allows preserving all the business rules that exist in a core-business application.
On my next post I’m going to provide more details about the expected benefits for this specific migration project.
Sending files can sometimes be a bit pesky. Depending on the size limit set by your SMTP server, you will usually end up splitting the file in smaller chunks or following
some other method. There are various compression mechanisms out there that work OK, such as zip or rar. Lately, I have found a new compression format called 7z.
I have been compressing archives and the level of compression of 7z (especially with word files that have embedded images) is amazing. I was able to compress a 24 Mb word file to 4 MB in less than 5 seconds. I really don't know if RAR offers the same (or better) compression ratio, but AFAIK, there is no RAR compression solution for OS X.
7z has various clients available for lots of platforms out there. My personal for OS X is
7zX. Download one of them and give them a try, you might save a byte or two.
Today I was helping a colleage to restore an image that was created with TrueImage to an empty VHD. The process can be narrowed down to the following steps:
- Create the image using TrueImage
- Create two VHDs on the target VM (one to store the image, and the other to restote the image to)
- Mount the VHD that will hold the TrueImage image using vhdmount and format it
- Copy the Image from step 1 onto the VHD
- Unmmount the image and commit changes
- Boot into drive image and restore the image
Sounds easy? Well, usually it is - but today I faced a problem with step 3 above. When I mounted the VHD and formatted it, everything seemed fine, but when TrueImage tried to read the VHDs, it barfed and said that it was "unsupported". This was very weird since I mounted the VHDs time and time again without problems and the contents were inside. The VHDs were formatted as NTFS, so there really was no reason for the "unsupported" file format.
We tested and decided to format the partitions from within TrueImage using the new hardware wizard. After formatting them, I mounted the one that would hold the TrueImage image, copied the file and then tried to restore the image once again.
To my surprise, this time around TrueImage read both drives and the image contained on the VHD that I just copied. After that, it was just a matter of specifying the source and target and the P2V migration was underway.
Bottom line, if you are planning on using empty VHDs with TrueImage (the bootable CD), make sure that you format the VHD with the utility itself and not within Windows using vhdmount. Why? Dunno, but if someone would like to shed some light on this issue, please be my guest!
The first time you have to upgrade your database from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005, you might thing is simple process.
And and in very simplistic way of looking at the world it is.
But a REAL migration, from a REAL production database can be a lot more complex that what you can imagine.
A good friend of mine has had to experience recently the various venues of migration like this, and I really recommend his blog, he gives "Jedi" style tips you must consider if you want the Force to be with you.
For all things related to
VB6 to C# or VB.NET software migration, be sure to visit Artinsoft's website.
There are many possibilities today when you would like to send a big file to a user. IMHO, sending big files over e-mail is a big waste of bandwidth; think about it. You send the file to the mail server, which sends it over to the recipients mail server, which is then transferred over to the recipients machine. The file travels a lot!
It is best to send links to files you would like to download (unless you are sending small files). For the last year I had been using
streamload, but lately things have changed and it has just been awful.
I searched for a way to send big files and stumbled upon
SendSpace, which lets you send files without any problems. They offer a client for uploading files for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Furthermore, they offer some features such as notification when the file you have posted has been downloaded. Here is snapshot of the client, make sure you check it out:
During the last month, due to some testing we had to carry out with a software project, I needed to work with 64-bit virtual machines. Virtual Server does not support 64-bit virtual machines, so I downloaded a copy of VMWare's free server solution and decided to give it a try. After playing around with VMWare Server, I've had my ups and downs which I will try to contrast with my previous experiences with Virtual Server.
PriceBoth are free, no contest there. VMWare requires a registration process to obtain the product key for the server, which can be a bit of a hassle. Virtual Server requires a registration process as well but no product key is needed.
64-bit SupportVMWare's server runs as a 32-bit process on 64-bit hosts and offers support for 64-bit VMs (read again, slowly and it will make sense). Virtual Server runs as a 64-bit process on 64-bit hosts and does not offer support for 32-bit VMs.
Types of Virtual Hard DrivesVMWare offers virtual drives that expand as they become bigger or ones that are of fixed size. It does not offer what is known as Difference Disks in Virtual Server. These disks are amazing when working with lab environments or for multiple restore points, and is one feature I cannot believe is in some way or another on VMWare.
Undo Disks
VMware and Virtual Server both have this option. The restore process under VMWare is easier to carry out than on Virtual Server.
Cross CompatibilityVMWare Virtual Server imports Virtual Servers vhds seamlessly. It does, however, convert them to a big mess of chunks that is hard to maintain. Although Virtual Server does not import any other type of virtual hard drive from another reseller, there are tools out there that will do the job for you.
GUIEven though there are some clear advantages of having a web interface for Virtual Server, there should have been a binary to administer it. There are some
new alternatives out there that might work for Virtual Server, but the bottom line is that the 32-bit client for controlling VMWare's server blows any web application out of the water.
Overall, both are excellent products and the fact that they are free is amazing. I have grown so used to Virtual Server that I will continue to use it unless I have the specific need for a 64-bit VM, and when that time comes, I will hopefully be able to use Longhorn Virtualization.
Sometimes you need to extract one file from an MSI file. A typical example is when you need just one DLL in order to make a project compile, but in order to get it you need to download and install a complete application. The ideal solution is to get the DLL file from the MSI file without having to perform the installation.
Some installers allow you extract the files to create a network installation. This is normally done using the command msiexec /a . Not all of them extract all the files, though.
Well, there is a small utility hilariously called Less MSIérables that allows you to extract files from msi installers. It works great – it has been around for a while, and I’ve used it several times to get me out of tough spots. I definitely recommend that you check it out!!
Recently I kept getting this error when trying to install SQL Server 2005 Express Edition:
An installation package for the product Microsoft SQL Server Native Client cannot be found. Try the installation again using a valid copy of the installation package 'sqlncli.msi'
After re-downloading the installation package and running the setup several times, I found this page. There I found a solution: go to Control Panel->Add or Remove Programs, and UNINSTALL the Microsoft SQL Server Native Client. Run the installation again, and this time it should work correctly.
I was featured on the June issue of IT Now, on an article they wrote about blogs. For this article I talked about how some attendees to one of the virtualization seminars in Zaragoza, Spain, recognized us from a solution he found here on our blogs. Since the magazine is in spanish, this is a rough translation:
Jose Aguilar, one of the most recognized company bloggers, comments: "I think that the most important thing is the communication channel that you open with the readers. Another importat thing is the name that you create for yourself, your reputation. Recently, on an international seminar, one of the attendees recognized us from a problem he was having, and he found the solution on one of our blog posts.”
Click on the image below to get a high-resolution scan of the article:
IT Now is a magazine about business and teconology for the Central American market. You can check out their website here.
In order to fully take advantage of the XML source code comments available in C#, you need to use all the features offered by the XML comment system.For this, the best guide I’ve found so far is this: XML Comments Let You Build Documentation Directly From Your Visual Studio .NET Source Files .
Also, in order to extract the XML comments that work as and input to the Sandcastle tools, follow these steps:
- Inside the Visual Studio 2005 Solution Explorer, right click on your C# project
- Select Properties from the popup menu
- Select Build
- Make sure the checkbox XML documentation file is selected. Enter the path and file name where you want the XML file to be generated.
With that setting, the next time you build your application the XML file will be generated for you.
Some time ago we had some issues with the WDS Image Capture Wizard that WDS inserts into WinPE to create capture images . When we got to the screen where you select the drive letter you want, the WDS Image Capture Wizard didn't list the drives, not even the C: drive. We could get to it using the command prompt, though, so we created those test images by running imagex manually.
Well, it turns out that we were just documenting the processes at the time, with a full OS install on the hard disk. In what could be described as a RTFM moment, we finally figured out what was wrong – the WDS Image Capture Wizard only lists Sysprep’d drives. Once we ran Sysprep on the OS installation, everything worked smoothly with the Capture Wizard.
The moral of the story is that sometimes it pays to read the manual (and follow the instructions) before jumping head-first into a project. 
Some time back I blogged about the Sandcastle project over at Microsoft, a tool that allows you to generate MSDN-style documentation from the comments in the .NET code (among other things). I recently downloaded the Sandcastle - June 2007 Community Technology Preview (CTP) to generate some documentation for a project we did with the HPC team at Microsoft. Even though it is still a CTP, it works great – right now I am able to add comments to the code and then generate sufficient documentation semi-automatically, killing two birds with one stone.
If you are interested in using this tools, make sure to check out post Creating a Chm build using Sandcastle at the Sandcastle blog . Remember that Sandcastle will extract and transform the comments from your files, but you still need the HTML Help Workshop to create the actual *.chm file.
I just found out (the hard way) about something (that I could
not find documented anywhere) that should be done when you are upgrading a WIndows 2003 R2 SP1 box to SP2 if you are planning on using WDS.
If you upgrade Windows Server without belonging to a domain, WDS will NOT work when you try and configure it. You will get a very useful error instead:
WDS Error Code: 0xe0000102which can be translated to: "You should have been on a domain prior to installing SP2!"
AFAIK, there is no turning back. I tested this theory using virtual machines and it holds - no domain, no WDS, no cigar.
VMWare, VirtualPC, Virtual Server, Parallels - they all have one thing in common: in order to work faster, they install a set of drivers that patch the VM. This has a very positive effect on the virtual experience, but what happens when, say - the VMWare drivers are running under Virtual Server?
As you might have guessed it, no good things happen.
Products such as Parallels and VMWare Virtual Server allow you to import machines that were created with Microsoft's virtualization products. If you grab a machine from Microsoft's VHD test drive program and import it right away, you are in for a nasty surprise. The drivers for the previous product are still there, and they *will* conflict when you install the additions of the new product.
So remember, get rid of your product's "additions" *before* migrating virtual machines.